Times is tough, so kudos to Silver Linings Playbook for giving us two movies for the price of one. I think I could’ve enjoyed either of these movies. But maybe not both.

The inescapable commercials for this film seemed to hint at a goofy romantic comedy. A rom-com, as the kids like to say. “He’s mentally unstable! She’s certifiable! But nothing’s crazier… than love!”

Ah, but the screenwriter and director is David O. Russell, who brought us Three Kings, The Fighter, and that tape of him in a screaming match with Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees. So maybe this would be a but more nuanced than your standard issue, you know, Jennifer Aniston/Gerard Butler/Katherine Heigl/Dermot Mulroney thing I used to watch on planes before they started charging extra.

And for a long while, this is a very different sort of rom-com. It’s heavier. It’s kind of cool. It’s a serious exploration of mental illness softened just so for a mainstream audience. The cast is very strong, and it’s interesting to see three levels of acting ability on-screen. Robert DeNiro, without Ben Stiller in sight, is firing on all cylinders, screaming, contorting his face, shrugging his shoulders. It’s great to see. Bradley Cooper, who I am not a big fan of, handles himself admirably, not making a caricature of the mentally ill and showing Mr. DeNiro that hey, I can scream too. Jennifer Lawrence comes in third but is still impressive as the reforming bad girl with some lingering… issues. (As for my own issues, though I absolutely knew it was Jennifer Lawrence, when she first walks on-screen, I still decided she was Juliette Lewis. Didn’t help that Juliette Lewis is currently in that Chevy Chase Christmas Vacation commercial for Old Navy.)

But then, in the final third of the movie, it’s almost like Russell decided, you know what, I do want to make a silly romantic comedy. The deception! The competition! The convenience of having all our favorite characters together! The wisecracking black guy! (Did you really cast Chris Tucker? Really?) A deserted holiday-decorated street scene! It’s like Russell had some kind of, I don’t know, Rom-Com Playbook and was checking off the clichés as he went along.

The actions were getting so absurd that I decided it was a dream sequence, a delusion in the mind of our mentally unstable protagonist. I even thought that Russell had lifted a losers-have-their-moment concept from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (This is set in Philly as well.)

But, no.

So, I don’t know, overall, still leaning toward enjoyable, especially if you really like that sort of thing. And the commercials warned me, they really did.